Meeting in the Blue Room, Pacific Asia Museum, Saturday August 21, 2010

While our wonderful moderator, Deborah P Kolodji was on her way to San Francisco to be one of the four honored readers at "Two Autumns" reading, Billie Dee was here from San Diego to host the meeting and lead the anonymous haiku workshop. Many interesting discussions extended throughout the meeting on topics of kigo, Japanese language elements, Southern California seasons, characteristics of haiku composition, historical and contemporary, haiku books for study and more. We each read a new haiku to begin the session, or one favorite from our books. Conversation on haiku and Billie's interesting views and questions followed, while we sipped jasmine tea and shared snacks. After ripening figs was suggested as a local summer kigo, one of our members walked in with figs from her own tree! After a break we contributed and continued with an anonymous haiku workshop. Genie wrote the haiku on the whiteboard, and Lynn timed the discussion, which was very animated and helpful. By extending the end-time we finished discussions on all the haiku and more! We were all thinking of Debbie and her reading, happy that she was honored in this way, and looking forward to our next meeting and our anthology reading September 26.